Thursday, October 13, 2011

From Food Stamps to Food Prize

Today we celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the
World Food Prize by honoring past Presidents John Kufour of Ghana and Jose Lula
de Silva of Brazil for their tremendous efforts in transforming their countries
by putting hunger and food security first.

I’ve spent the past three days listening to panels on global
hunger, women in agriculture, the role of the private sector, and making amazing
contacts. However – no interaction struck me more than meeting the Midwestern
Representative of the USDA Nutrition Service. I actually met her in the
bathroom, both of us were judiciously re-applying our lipgloss, and she made me
promise that I’d visit her booth immediately after leaving the restroom. I
briefly thought about the fact that this wasn’t exactly in my sweet spot, but I
gave her my word and beelined it to her booth after my brief touch up.

There at the booth I saw a long list of programs run by the
nutrition service, topping these off were food stamps, WIC, free lunch, and
school breakfast programs. I thought to myself, they might as well have put a
portrait of me on this board! I had been a recipient of these programs from my
first days in public schools until donning my cap & gown and heading to
college. These programs allowed me to focus on school without a hungry belly,
helped my mom keep her income to pay bills and household expenses, and
benefited countless kids in my neighborhood. Yet I never knew that these
programs were connected to agriculture, in my head the USDA was about food
pyramids and now "My Plate" lol.

Americans are just beginning to connect agriculture to food
in a real way. Unfortunately, most of the discussion rallies around opposing
science and innovations that aren’t completely understood. While I am
definitely a fan of today’s push for organics, labeling, and urban gardens, I
also understand hunger in the global context and know that it takes the right
mix of tools to put a dent in the numbers of hungry people. Both of today’s
food prize recipients made school feeding a crucial component of their
strategies to leave no person hungry in their countries and each are well on
their way to surpassing the goals set for Millennium Development Goal 1:
halving global hunger by 2015. They’ve paired school feeding with investments
and application of technology, policy change, and development programs that
work. It can be done.

Reading the materials, I felt proud of my journey and
extremely humble. I remember being ashamed of going to the store with food
stamps (I was pre-EBT card) and frustrated about my inability to buy pizza or
sodas at lunch. Today I realize just how much of a blessing these programs are.
They allowed this black girl to go from food aid to food’s biggest stage.